InMotion Hosting VPS-1000HA-S Review

InMotion Hosting VPS-1000HA-S

Network

Support

Reliability

Price to Performance

Summary

InMotion Hosting (IMH) are a popular US-based hosting company founded in 2001, they currently host over 300,000 domains and have won many awards for their services. They have provided us with one of their VPS-1000HA-S packages to review for our readers.

5.0

Quick Information

All of the InMotion Hosting Data Centres are environmentally friendly, even being the first host to open a green Data Centre in Los Angeles which uses special cooling solutions to reduce their carbon output by nearly 2000 tons each year.

They have also been verified by CNET for over 10 years and achieved an A+ Better Business Bureau rating for outstanding business practices.

InMotion also offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee on all their VPS, Dedicated and reseller plans, you can read more about this in their terms of service.

Pre Sales

This isn’t really applicable since there was no pre “sales” talk. I was contacted by Sev Salibian from InMotion Hosting who offered us a VPS to review, free of charge, for all of my amazing readers (you guys!) to read and enjoy.

As like our other reviews have been, there will be no bias on this review and we are completely neutral, we’re very grateful to InMotion Hosting for giving us the server to review!

Cost

The server we’ve been provided is a managed VPS with cPanel with the following specifications –

RAID 6 75GB SSD Storage

4TB Monthly Premium Bandwidth

4GB RAM (They dynamically allocate RAM, in low traffic times the plan we have 1.5GB but will have the 4GB available when needed)

3 Static IP addresses

Included cPanel License worth $200/yr

CentOS with LAMP Stack / cPanel pre-installed

Virtuozzo Virtualization.

$29.99/mo when billed yearly.

Some of the more advanced features can be found later on in our review, we’re just showing the VPS specifications here.

InMotion Hosting is at a higher price point than the hosts that we have featured so far, but for a good reason. InMotion Hosting offers full server management on all of their VPS servers, this means that all server updates, security fixes and your cPanel installation are managed by InMotion Hosting’s support staff, unmanaged hosts require you to do this yourself. Backups are also provided for free which I don’t see often with other VPS hosts. They also offer two choices of Data Centers to locate your VPS in, being either on the East or West coast of the USA.

I’d say that InMotion Hosting is giving you a pretty amazing deal on a managed server, cPanel and the resources, especially when you see the benchmarks later on!).

There are also a few extras included with the service, these being $100 Google advertising credit, Free $75/Bing advertising credit, $75 in free clicks from Amazon Product Ads and a free listing on YP.com.

Performance & Benchmarks

It’s fair to say that this VPS is one of the fastest I have used, the disk speed is awesome with an amazing network to top it off. You won’t have any issues running a large website on this server.

You can see a freevps.us/bench.sh, nench.sh and Speedtest-CLI test below. Nench.sh is new to our benchmarking but will give us some nice information on CPU strength.

InMotion Hosting Technical Support

InMotion Hosting say that they offer “Premier Support” with their services. This includes help with things such as opening an account, helping beginners get online and also being able to speak at a high technical level to those who understand such as professionals.

IMH offers many different methods of getting support, they have authorised tickets, ordinary tickets, live chat support, phone support, Skype support and community support.

They have also written a guide on how to contact them, they don’t mention Skype as a technical support option so I’m assuming that it is only for sales.

So how did their support team perform?

I opened a verified ticket asking which location the review VPS had been deployed in, I did this via a authorised ticket from the InMotion Hosting AMP, this was at roughly 19:30 EDT, I received a reply via email at 22:50 EDT telling me where the VPS had been deployed and the option of moving it if I would like.

I never actually had any issues with the server (which is a good thing!) so I couldn’t fully test out the support at InMotion Hosting, I can definitely say you’re in good hands with them though.

Extra Features

InMotion Hosting offers a lot of features which aren’t available or cost absorbent prices with other providers service.

Here are some of the awesome things that they offer –

High availability on their VPS Hosting

If your VPS node suffers an outage, for example a failed hard drive, your VPS will not go offline. This is because your VPS running programs and files are backed up to multiple nodes in realtime. If the main node your VPS is deployed on goes offline either due to hardware or network failure, an exact copy will take over near instantaneously making downtime almost unnoticeable.

Included cPanel License

Other hosts charge an extra $120-$200/yr for their cPanel licenses, this drives up their costs drastically compared to InMotion Hosting who provide it free of charge.

InMotion provides free backups on their VPS plans, these are live snapshots so they also capture running proceses. This means that your VPS can be restored in the exact state it was captured in.

InMotion Hosting’s data centers also have high end security solutions such as CCTV, Hand Scanners, Vaults and even armed guards!

99.9% Uptime

I wanted to test whether the network at InMotion Hosting was as stable as they claimed so I set a ping monitor and a HTTP request monitor up to the server. These check every 5 minutes to see whether the server is answering pings and also whether it is accepting HTTP requests. I am very pleased with the result I got from this test, a perfect 100% uptime since setting up the monitor a month ago.

InMotion Hosting also use a custom control panel for their customer and server interface, called AMP. It combines all features such as support and billing but also allows you to easily control your server at the same time.

This is the InMotion Hosting control panel. The domain we used for this review has been edited out.

I have to say I quite like this panel compared to the standard WHMCS installs I’ve seen so far from the other hosts we’ve reviewed. AMP isn’t overcrowded or difficult to use like 1&1’s control panel and it’s also pretty speedy. It also offers a 1 click install of BoldGrid, a modified WordPress installation that allows you to build websites quickly and easily.

Conclusion

I would happily recommend InMotion Hosting if you’re looking for a managed VPS located on the East or West coast of the USA. They offer great support and reliable, fast performing servers. I also experienced no downtime during my period of testing at all and the performance of the server stayed quick and consistent. I really like AMP and think it’s what a lot of other hosts should use as inspiration for their own control panels, much nicer than the same WHMCS control panel I see over and over again (although I understand why they use it).

There are a few things that I would recommend however, although these could be pretty simple to do. I think it would be good if the Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate plugin for cPanel is preinstalled on the VPS packages by default although you can ask for support to install it for you or do it your self, it would be very nice to see it implemented.

It would also be nice if you were able to view and manage your support ticket status and history from the AMP panel, this is a personal preference. By default all replies to support requests are done via email which could become confusing when looking back on previous tickets.

Again, thanks to InMotion Hosting for providing us with the trial VPS for this review!

Leave your own experiences with InMotion Hosting in the comments below

2 thoughts on “InMotion Hosting VPS-1000HA-S Review”

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